Until recently I had no idea what this book was about. I don’t mean to say that I couldn’t follow the plot (although that happened on more than one occasion), but rather that it was unclear to me whether this was a book about tennis or addiction or entertainment or families or friendships or pet-murdering psychos or what. It seemed to be about all of the above, each in turn, but none for very long.

But from where I now stand–9/10ths of the way through and surveying the path I have trod thus far–it now seems obvious to me what the book is “about”. Infinite Jest is a novel about sincerity.107

The question now becomes: why does it take so long to realize this? Surely this does not reflect well on Wallace, that he so thoroughly buried the lede that someone could abandon the tome 800 pages in and still not know the point. In fact, it seems as though those with only a superficial knowledge of the book–having read only the first 50 pages before giving up, say, or basing their opinion solely on synopses of the plot and setting–describe the book as the very opposite of sincere, as ironic and cynical and dark.

My theory is that Wallace has pulled a reverse Mary Poppins, here. Rather than using a spoonful of sugar to disguise the medicine, he set his novel in a borderline dystopia, full of depression and suicide and malcontents, effectively disguising the simple and (dare I say it?) sweet message at it’s core. And he spreads it out over a solid k of pages so that, at no given moment, are you aware of what you’re imbibing.

No moment except perhaps this one:

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. The worst-feeling thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far above Mario’s head… And Hal was for once no help, because Hal seemed even more uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up real stuff Hal called him Booboo and acted like he’d wet himself and Hal was going to be very patient about helping him change.

That passage is found just shy of 600 pages in. And I can’t help but wonder what my reaction would have been if it had appeared on page 13. Would I have rolled my eyes, or laughed in a way that isn’t happy, or chalked this novel up as just a bunch of glurge best suited for the Oprah bookclub?108 Would my Sincerity Deflector Shields been reflexively raised, and remained in battle position for the remaining 950 pages?

As Kevin noted earlier, my generation has been steeped in irony since the get-go, and plunging into a novel that argued against such modes of thinking would have been the literary equivalent of Cold Turkey, the Bird, white-knuckling. Instead, what Infinite Jest provides is a 13 week irony detox program,109 designed to reduce the cynicism in your system at a slow enough rate that you don’t go all P.T.-Kraus-on-a-subway.

And then at some point you realize that Wallace has been performing something like a spiritual transfusion, that he hasn’t simply been leeching you of cynicism but also craftily impressing upon you the usefulness, the importance, the utter necessity of sincerity. The dude is like a giant ATHSCME fan, keeping the miasma of toxicity at bay.

As we reach the end of Infinite Jest the question becomes: can we retain the message that DFW struggled so mightily to impart, or is a relapse inevitable? It’s too bad there isn’t something like an Ennet House for IJ veterans, designed to keep us from drifting to our old ways of thinking, our “default settings” as it were. I can see now why people feel the need to reread the novel on a regular basis: “Keep coming back”.

Living a life of sincerity is a challenge, but Wallace is going to be very patient about helping us change.

31 Comments

One of the most engaging aspects of Wallace’s work, to me, is his approach to ‘cynicism and naivete’.

In the quote below I’m referring to an analysis of the above phrase (‘cynicism and naivete’) by Marshall Boswell in his ‘Understanding David Foster Wallace’ book. The phrase appears not only in Infinite Jest, but in two earlier works, one of them non-fiction…

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It wasn’t until Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace was released did (as far a I am aware) any critical work begin to focus upon the importance of Westward to DFW’s direction. On pages 16 and 17 of his publication, Boswell revealed that DFW had used the phrase ‘cynicism and naivete’ in ‘Westard The Course of Empire Takes Its Way’ (from Girl With Curious Hair), in his essay ‘E Unibus Pluram’ (from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’d Never Do Again), and in Infinite Jest. Boswell wrote that Wallace ‘does not merely join cynicism and naivete: rather, he employs cynicism – here figured as sophisticated self-reflexive irony – to recover a learned form of heartfelt naivete, his work’s ultimate mode and what the work “really means,” a mode that Wallace equates with the “really human.” ‘

I sat stunned after first reading Boswell’s passage. In the days following I picked up Infinite Jest for yet another read.

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You can read all of my extended intro to Kevin McMorrow’s MA Thesis here (it’s just too long to post here, and not all relevant). The first part of Kevin’s thesis is a fantastic overview to Wallace’s place in contemporary writing and worth reading.

This is so beautifully put! We had a small meet-up in Tampa on Sept. 12 and one of the overall thoughts we had about the book and about DFW’s writing was the warmth of it. You’ve described it just right. It does creep up on you and after a while you realize you’ve been changed.
And I think, Mr. Baldwin, that you have actually created an Ennet House like environment for us right here at Infinite Summer. Thank you!

To me the sincerity theme and not becoming overwhelmed with the struggles with life is what makes what happened to Wallace after the book so tragic. Could he not practice what he preached? The one scene that really resonated with is the section where they discuss how going white knuckle is like Evel Knievel jumping cars and if you keep track of the cars the task becomes too great. That is the beauty of the program and life to me, easy does it and one day at a time are the model for success. To me it implies that previous success and past accomplishments are too much if you keep harping on them. So glad I stuck with this book even though at times I was and still am very confused about what is going on. Speaking of which are the chapter summaries coming out? Those are a life saver and provide affirmation that I am not completely lost:-)

haven’t been doing the infinite summer, because i *thought* i’d be doing my “dissertation summer.” But now, reading just this one post, I am feeling sorry that I didn’t do infinite summer, and curious. Curious enough, and wanting some real sincerity enough, that I just might try Infinite Jest sometime in the near future.

It may become the Gravitys Rainbow of the new millennium for me (the book I try and try to read but never can, but I’ll do it before I die), but I think the time is nearing for me to meet up with David Foster Wallace on the pages of Infinite Jest.

Get a buddy with whom you can read this book and you WILL do it. I had someone I could check in w/ through the slog. If she kept it up so could I. It was like trudging up a mountain you had no intention of really climbing but there you are coz you thought it was going to be “fun” to give it a go. Once you get to like page 300 — it’s like reaching the summit where the vista opens up and you have a view of a surprising magnificence. When you reach that point in your reading you’ll be calling anyone you know to beg, “Can I just read this passage to you???” You will not be able to contain yourself — the genius of the book, the loving presence of the author and the heartbreaking beauty of it…and you will at times just have to put the book down coz you need the private time to just laugh and laugh and laugh. And shake your head, marveling that you are alive and how lucky you are: because you can be touched so deeply on levels. So don’t wait. Just pick it up and read it.

I guess I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is THE theme of the novel. With so many ideas and concepts whirling around, I don’t think there was meant to be only one unifying theme. But I do think we’re grasping onto something important with this idea.
The sincerity Mario longs for – where people interact honestly and openly with each other – is just one kind of sincerity. I was struck more by the idea of sincerity towards oneself. This is a major theme in the novel’s treatment of addiction and AA – each person can only be responsible for their own recovery. Even if the “one day at a time”-type maxims, and the “higher power” seem phony or preachy, it’s not until each person can accept these concepts in his or her own way that recovery can actually begin. I guess what he’s saying is,

“This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man”

Matthew – I agree with your analysis, but I would change your metaphor from the reverse-Poppins to a sucker punch. DFW has you feeling all nice and ironic, and then Mario suckerpunches you in the gut with this paragraph. It has now taken the wind out of me twice, thanks to you. The sincerity theme is definitely what had the most impact on me, central them or no. This bit and the part where Hal chases off the UHID rep chatting up Mario brought me to tears. Both are places where DFW gives us the “really real”.

This seems really true. And it seems you could back it up with stuff DFW actually said. Like in that fabled Salon interview:

“It seems to me that the intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that’s gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like “It’s really important not to lie.” OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can’t trust you. I feel that I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, “Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.” The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting — which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff — can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.”

I’ve read every post on this site and eagerly await new ones. This one has proved why more so than most others. Terrific post, and spot on, providing me with exactly-what-i-needed-to-read-at-this-moment. Thanks.

Joelle, “makeupless and stone-sober”, is cleaning her Ennet House room within an inch of its life, and is reflecting on “JOI’s” work, Infinite Jest (pg. 740). I heard the author critiquing his own work in this, and hinting at what Matt describes in his post here:

“But there had been flashes of something else. Even in the early oeuvre, before Himself made the leap to narratively anitconfluential but unironic melodrama…where he dropped the technical fireworks and tried to make characters move, however inconclusively, and show courage, abandoned everything he did well and willingly took the risk of appearing amateurish (which he had). But even in the early Work – flashes of something.”

That snip’s idea comes up a lot in Wallace’s writing, including his review of the Joseph Frank Dostoyevsky bios — a modern writer expressing such unfashionable, sincere and honest and heartfelt feelings would be “laughed out of town” which he says is “our own age’s truest version of hell”. And he talks about the next generation of literary rebels going in that direction.

After reading IJ, one’s radar picks up irony with a different sensitivity, no? When I hear an ironic or sarcastic (or cynical even) comment now, I reflexively ask: what’s behind that? Hoping there’s something like DFW’s sincerity (read the Truth) there as well, though that’s generally not the case.

Irony is not the problem itself — the whole of IJ is ironic; it’s when it’s only used in a meaningless and mean-spirited manner (I think we call it snarky) that it’s dangerous. Yes, dangerous.

Our discomfort with sincerity, with the “real stuff” as mentioned in the Mario passage above, makes it impossible to really communicate, which is the most
resonant theme of many themes for me in IJ. Thanks for highlighting that Mario passage. Re-reading it now makes it even sadder to know that Hal was not able to talk even with golden Mario, let alone Himself. Because of this weird, ironic distance. As if it wasn’t hard enough to talk to one’s parents already in whichever generation. All the introductory passages re: Hal’s inability to communicate are sadder now too.

Cuz when the JOI wraith tells Gately why he created the Entertainment, Infinite Jest, it broke my heart. What an f’ing, beautiful irony indeed!! And I saluted DFW: he accomplished what he set out to do: to write a sad, sad novel.

So irony and sincerity — not mutually exclusive. Their synthesis works. The book I read immediately after finishing IJ this summer was Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun. After reading IJ and having Eggers’s AHBWOSG in mind, the contrast of the writing style in Zeitoun is astonishing, what clarity; most of the sentences are short, non-compound, declarative sentences. The reason I am mentioning this is because Eggers, like DFW, was believed to be this [negative-connotated] ironic writer because of all the post-modern tools he used in his early writing, but, like DFW, he is as sincere and earnest as heck. Maybe that’s why my fav folks are Midwesterners (I live in NY, thank god not LA). Looking at Zeitoun’s style, I got depressed thinking what DFW’s style might have evolved to after the Pale King. The other reason I mentioned Eggers is because Infinite Jest, the book, could also have been unironically sincerely truly have been titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Thank You for the post. This is why IJ has never ended up in a storage box during the (I think) six states I’ve lived in since I first read it. As one of those annoying people who has been trying to shove this book into people’s hands for a long time, it means a lot to see people in a community like this finding in it exactly the sort of thing that has made this book so valuable to me, and why I “keep coming back”

The comment by “K”, above, makes me wonder if, now that IS has added to the number of DFW/IJ “crocodiles” out there, if there is a way to, for lack of a better word, “sponsor” people like K who, by circumstance or choice, are joining the party late. Hmmmm.

Randomly, and wanting something slim & quick, when I finished Infinite Jest, I picked up Catcher In The Rye. Turns out Holden’s interior dialogue is another shade of cynicism vs naivete. The phonies make Holden sad and depressed. Losing the sincerity of youth is too much for him. Not intended, but this is highlighting these important themes for me. Clearly, Wallace brought things much further. Honesty with oneself, sincerity with others, living for the moment…

I had, to some extent, figured this out much earlier — somewhere shy of the halfway point — though I can’t pinpoint a precise passage that made me realize, and I don’t think that I’d given it the full status of “what IJ is about”. I’m glad that you came and pointed it out to everyone, it’s definitely important to know.

Mario is one part of the theme. I think the other part is Boston AA. Everything that Wallace portrays as important about the program is just as much about being a real, present, and sincere human being as it is about staying off Substances. The way the AA participants talk, they way they listen, they way they try to behave – they’re trying to be more like Mario.

Drop any other character from IJ into a Boston AA meeting and what kind of reaction would you get? Confusion, distaste or disgust, cynical rejection. Hal would probably figure out sooner or later how to perform for the AA crowd the way he figured out how to perform for the grief therapist. But Mario, surely, would never have to be told how to listen and Identify without judging, would automatically find it Good To Hear You, could no more take someone’s inventory than arm-wrestle them.

naptimewriting finds a valuable discussion of Hal’s feeling state/anahedonia at about p. 694, and tells why she loves this about DFW’s writing (that it takes 700 pages to “get it”). Also notes “dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain” (695) as the amplification of this theme. Worth the visit, y’all, if you haven’t taken time to check out her blog.

I’ve read IJ this year and enjoyed it. I’ve read Cryptonomicon this year, another book mentioned on this site, and loved it. I’ve read The Corrections this year and also thought it was good. However, if there’s one book that blew me away, that was extremely sincere and that I would recommend above all aforementioned, it would be Earth Abides by George Stewart. Excellent.

When I was a little less than halfway through IJ my wife asked me what made it different to the other books by other famous contemporary authors I’d read: Underworld, The New York Trilogy, The Corrections, The Sportswriter, and so on. I struggled for a while to come up with an answer, mumbling about incredible attention to detail, rich world-building, a beautifully confounding plot before answering confidently, “there’s real sincerity in what he writes about his characters and the people they represent.”

Reading this post and all the people ID’ing with you in these comments is heartening. I feel like I’m being purged of Cynicism – a Substance I have abused heavily in the past – and it feels good. I’ll Keep Coming Back in the hope of staying off the stuff indefinitely.

Like everyone else, I’ve struggled mightily to tell answer the question, “What is IJ about?” All along, I’ve gotten the feeling that book is not so much a story as a process. Reading it, I could almost feel my brain being forced through a series of maneuvers that were noticeably changing my outlook on many things. From the very first chapters, every aspect (e.g., the changing narrators, the swings from humor to horror, plausible to surreal) moved me away from looking for a unifying plot line, and more to the conviction that the way to read this book was to let it take me where it would, without resistance.

While there is some semblance of a story line, blathering to others about 12-step programs, tennis, and wheelchair assassins did no more to convey the totality of IJ as a book than blathering about a black and white checkerboard and the shapes of the pieces conveys the totality of a chess game. I have pointed people to This Is Water as a way of trying to convey some of the emotional direction of the work.

I think Matthew has gotten a handle on at least part of it – the process is a detox process, a process of bringing one in touch with the really real.

The success of the book in this fashion is absolutely astonishing. It’s hard to imagine the mind that could conceive of such a literary device.

Apologies to others who may have already found this article, but just found a long sorta-scholarly article on the web that seems to do a pretty good and detailed job of addressing this same issue of how DFW approaches sincerity and irony. Struck me as nicely down to earth and readable:

He writes: “For those of us who came of age in the 1990s, his fiction was a relief and a gift.” Indeed.

After reading Matthew’s post (above) I was thinking it again–what a relief!–that others read the novel this way. Sincerely, that is. Which is right on.

I also like how he (Jon Baskin) addresses a common misunderstanding of Wallace: “But this said more about the wariness and suspicion with which some segments of American culture viewed what they (mistakenly) believed to be Wallace’s postmodern pedigree than it did about Wallace himself.”

Thanks for this post. It feels like sincerity, or moving past irony (not ignoring it or dismissing it but acknowledging its usefulness and simultaneous uselessness)and settling into painful, beautiful, honest emotion is the point of this book. And that we can’t start there. We have to see pain and beauty and honesty and *then* be led into the emotion.
The fact that we can get to a point where some people think the point of the book is sincerity is why I am an official IJ pusher and Keep Coming Back.

[…] success is a triumph of sincerity over cynicism, which is, as Matthew Baldwin has been arguing this week, a major theme in Infinite Jest. In the book, of course, the sincerity is for the most part […]

Great thoughts Matthew! I think it was his interview with Michael Silverblatt, back when the book first came out, when he said he thought of writing as an attempt to connect with others. I always got the feeling both from this novel and his comments that he was genuinely worried for humanity, and he was trying to offer advice before we ground ourselves into obscurity with commercialism, addiction, celebrity, and vanity. Maybe he didn’t want to be preachy, so he pleaded with us through the telling of a powerful story, a parable of sorts.